Stanford Orbit

Inspiration

Stanford staff, students, and event planners juggle a fragmented set of tools — fingate for budgets, 25Live for venues, separate spreadsheets for checklists, and institutional knowledge scattered across email threads. We wanted to build a single, beautiful workspace that felt native to Stanford: something that understood meal policy limits, knew the difference between CEMEX Auditorium and the Oak Lounge, and could answer "what's my budget for 50 people at a dinner reception?" in seconds.

What it does

Orbit is a personalized Stanford staff dashboard with an AI assistant built in. Users pick a role — Staff/Admin, Student, or Event Planner — and get a pre-configured workspace of widgets tailored to their needs. Widgets include an Event Planner, Budget Calculator (auto-enforcing Stanford meal policy limits), Venue Finder with match scoring across 10 on- and off-campus venues, Calendar, To-Do lists, Link Library, Countdown timers, Notes, Contact Cards, and more. The Orbit AI assistant runs in the sidebar and answers questions about Stanford policy, venue recommendations, and event planning in real time. Everything can be exported as CSV, PDF, JSON, ICS for Google Calendar, Notion Markdown, or a pre-filled email draft.

How we built it

Orbit is a fully self-contained single-page HTML application. The dashboard is built with a 12-column CSS grid of modular widgets, each independently renderable and editable. The AI assistant is powered by the Anthropic Claude API (claude-sonnet-4), with a Stanford-specific system prompt that encodes meal policy limits, compliance language, and institutional resources like OSEP and fingate. Widget state is managed in plain JavaScript objects, and the entire workspace can be exported in multiple formats from the client side.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping the AI grounded in Stanford-specific policy without hallucinating dollar limits or venue details required careful prompt engineering. Building a flexible widget grid where each widget is independently editable — with no state management library — meant writing a clean render/update pattern from scratch. We also had to carefully audit every widget and role template to remove any UI paths that surfaced broken or unverifiable data, like the catering lookup and the student assignment tracker, to keep the experience reliable for real users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that Orbit works end-to-end as a real tool — not a demo. The Budget Calculator correctly enforces Stanford's October 2024 meal policy limits ($50 breakfast, $85 lunch, $160 dinner, $210 reception+dinner), the Venue Finder ranks real bookable venues with working links, and the AI assistant gives contextually accurate answers about Stanford policy. The role-based onboarding, multi-workspace tabs, and export suite all work out of the box in a single HTML file.

What we learned

Institutional knowledge is harder to encode than general knowledge — the gap between "AI that knows about event planning" and "AI that knows Stanford's specific meal reimbursement policy" is significant, and that specificity is what makes a tool actually useful to staff. We also learned that the best AI-powered products are the ones where the AI augments a well-designed interface rather than replacing it.

What's next for Stanford Orbit

We'd love to integrate directly with 25Live for live venue availability, and sync calendar events to Google Calendar or Outlook natively. Longer term, Orbit could expand to other universities using the same modular architecture — each institution bringing its own policy data, venue database, and branded theme.

Built With

• claude